Heretofore, the processing of poultry and other fowl into ready-to-cook form required manual labor in many of the processing operations, especially in the removal of the viscera of the bird. This has been due mainly to the inability of the poultry processing industry to mechanically orient and hold each bird adequately during the processing thereof and to mechanically reproduce the manual steps of processing the bird while synchronously moving the bird with the various tools carrying out the processing operations. The use of manual labor in the processing of poultry has caused the processing cost to remain high and has caused difficulties in duplicating the same operations for each bird to control contamination of the carcass and to prevent mutilation and loss of edible parts of the poultry.